Soon though, the maiden may know them to.
She trains day and night. She swings her sword in her sleep. She slashes spare suits of armor packed with wild boar meat into scraps because she says she needs to feel the sensation of a real body, real slashing. She cuts apart shadows. She is very hard now. None of the girl that she first was. Slim and soft as a tropic beach. She is a black oak carving of a woman. She cuts her hair short with a dagger. She trains with a single mindedness that is almost feral, animal. She is a natural force. She is the sun and moon. She is the silver river.
Once, where you like her?
The two of you sit in the window together. The east tower is the tallest, and it is very cold up here. The firefly comets write impossible stories in the sky, and their long, thin tails fade as slow as lives. Somehow, she still smells like sweet, firewood ash.
“I’ll do it myself,” she says. “I will kill whatever knight comes. And you and I will live together in this castle for a long, long time. Maybe forever.”
“Comet can be our child,” you say, and because she laughs, a true, high laugh, full and whole, and because the wild light tangles in her short hair and her teeth like gentle fingers that could be your own, you do not even hate your own tattered voice.
She tells you that she loves you.
You don’t have the heart to tell her, that when her knight comes, she will fall into a heavy sleep, and you will carry her into the west tower and place her on a stone bed like a corpse, and you will lock the door behind you.
You have no choice.
Instead, you say that you love her too. And it is true. It is always true.
* * *
Another year passes. She has mastered ten forms and is working on the eleventh. You watch her. The arc of her sword has all the grace of a devout prayer. The kind you could never truly manage to make.
You feel her knight enter the forest. He is on the shortest route.
“The knight will come tomorrow,” you say.
She halts. Slowly, she lowers her sword. She is facing away from you. She breathes steady and low. Shoulders rising and falling just lightly. A fine sheen sweat over the new animal of her body like sweet oil. She is the most perfect creature you have ever seen or read about. You want her to stop, to never turn around, to never change. You want to be her.
“Show me the twelfth form,” she says, without turning around. The scent of her, fire and sweat and sweet ash, is everywhere.
You would like to go flying instead. For the first time in years, you feel the urge to pray to that great nothing that holds you, and that feeling makes this moment seem all the more hopeless. The sky, the lightning, the comets, have always been your only church.
“You’re not ready,” you say. She turns to face you. She has more natural talent with the sword than you’ve ever seen. Besides yourself. That is the face a woman who knows what she is. Who is what she wants to be. You believe in her now completely. She is your faith.
“I don’t care,” she says. “Show me.”
The twelfth form, The Lovers Struggle.
* * *
After showing her the form, the two of you take Comet to flight. You ride high and hard over the forest, and you wonder if her knight can see the two of you from somewhere far below. You ride as far as fate will allow you, the land blurring below you. A haze of color and light. A small village. A perfectly round lake. Grass hills. Dirt roads crisscrossing and thinning out and disappearing like people’s intersecting lives. You almost make it to the ocean. In the distance, you can see a strip of metallic blue water shimmering with reflected stars. You call for the maiden to look, but she has already passed into a deep, deep slumber.
You carry her like your child. At some point, they all feel like your children. The halls are cold and dark. You don’t bother with torches. You know this castle almost as well as you know your own body. Comet whines as you leave her behind. You don’t look back.
The gray stone you lay her on is carved with flowers tangled around swords. It smells like dark magic in here, lilac and poison ash. She is talking in her sleep. She is repeating the steps in the last form. The embrace. The tear. The scar. She is struggling to open her eyes. No maiden has ever opened their eyes.
* * *
You are standing on the bridge. You are always standing on the bridge. It is before dawn and the firefly comets are in frenzy above you, and they cast enough light see everything in a shimmering way. The silver river glows beneath you. This knight is an early riser, you think, or perhaps he has traveled all night for his maiden. His maiden.
There are three figures at the end of the bridge. You spot the knight immediately. He is standing on the left. The light is yellow and silver and blue and red and it casts deep shadows in their skin and makes their faces look like handsome masks. He has a wizard with him in red robes and a priest with a heavy silver mace. You hate silver and the ugliness and inelegance of maces.
The knight has dirty hands, and two exquisite knives in his belt, and a huge bow made out of black elder wood. A relic from the same age as you. His face is perfectly formed, and his skin is white as scar tissue. He radiates confidence, and that confidence emanates from a deep skill. You can tell. Normally, you would enjoy such an opponent. How many forms will he drag out of you? Six, seven? No knight has ever allowed you to go past nine. Most cannot push you to use three. But this morning feels like the last morning. This feels like the end of time. Like the end of the world.
You raise your great shield, a slab of phantom iron caved into the head of a demon, and charge them. Despite your size and the heaviness of your armor, you have great speed. Your speed surprises them. It always does. You hear the wizard begin to chant. A heaviness curse, for your armor no doubt, or perhaps your sword. The priest shouts something in a new, ugly language (could it really be a blessing?) and charges you right back. Arrows slam your shield like falling stars, and the shield is almost knocked from your hand. You hold. Blazing light falls all around like strange snow.
You slam into the priest and he stumbles back. You drop the shield and spin right into the sixth form, Storm’s Eye. An arrow flies right beside the priest’s stumbling head and glances off your breastplate, knocking your form off half a step. A nearly miraculous shot. You have placed the priest squarely between you and the knight. The priest shakes your weak blow off his shield swings his mace like a child swinging a bat. You slip easily away, and an arrow buries itself in your hip, right at the joint of your armor. The pain is immediate and boiling. You step back. A faint. Pain would never make you step back.
The priest’s teeth click together in a tombstone smile. He is blond with dead blue eyes and huge white teeth. He charges you. You pretend to stumble back from his shield push. He hefts his mace, grinning a wild man grin, and you split him right in half, shield and all. The eighth form. The Cleaving Sun.
Your armor weighs suddenly a hundred pounds more. Stone cracks beneath you. It grows heavier with each bounding step you take toward the wizard. Another arrow slams into your shoulder. You swat another out of the air with your sword. The wizard screams and a ball of white flame flies at you, but you turn and take it on your already dead shoulder. You slam your pierced burned shoulder into the wizard, and a look of shock spreads across his face as you send him flying back and over the edge of the bridge. He falls into a sea of silver light and is lost.
The knight manages to put two more arrows in your stomach and chest before you close the distance. He drops his bow and jumps back, ducking your clean strike, and draws his daggers. They’re made of petrified yellow glass, and they fly like comets.
One of your eyes has melted in its socket from the fireball. The arrows have some kind of acid poison on them, and you feel your muscles melting where their tips bury in your cool flesh. Your armor is at least three times as heavy now and getting heavier each moment, and the forms are starting to drain from your body like a second kind of blood.
Here is where you would normally surre
nder. Where you would normally allow you shattered body to collapse on the knight’s blades. The sun has still not risen. But the light is wild above you. And this feels like some great fête to which you are finally invited.
The knight is nimble as a wood fairy. He cuts at the joints of your armor with his yellow knives. He laughs, actually laughs, as you shakily swing your sword after him in pale imitations of the true forms. You think, he is the perfect man. He is so confident and strong and whole. And you are all fragments. You are all pieces that don’t quite fit together. You are the whole world’s villain. You are the best swordsman and the worst fighter. You are the oldest hunter and the worst cook. You are excellent at kidnapping and terrible, so terrible, at protecting.
You laugh too. You laugh and laugh. Your laughter is a horrible thing. Smoke and broken voice and metal echo in your helmet, and the knight falters just a half step. You swing your sword in the first step of the first form, the only one your body still remembers. The one that is most a part of you, buried inside you. The form in which you store your soul. The Beginning. You have swung your sword thousands and thousands of times. Uncountable times, over uncountable years, and this is the most perfect strike you have ever performed. This cut could sever fate. This cut could kill God, or, perhaps, resurrect him.
Every string of your body breaks in the process.
The knight’s glass knives shoot into a clean X, defending himself even as he jumps backwards to avoid the blow. Your sword shatters his knives in bursts of light. It shatters time and air. Its tip cuts inches deep all the way across his perfect face. Your sword goes flying.
And you both fall.
* * *
For how long do you lie there? You watch the firefly comets disappear in daylight, with your one good eye. You watch the sun roll across the soft blue of the sky. You do not pray. Your flesh is liquid under your skin where the four arrows pierced you. Your outer skin throbs where it was burned with curse fire. Is this what freedom feels like? You can hear the struggling breath of the knight nearby. He has not risen.
Your armor weighs more than the moon. The sun sets. The stars slowly come out, then the comets. Their wildness is comforting tonight. Their unpredictability. There is no fate to their paths. No curse to their existence. The light is heavy on you and the dying knight.
You hear someone approaching. Did the wizard survive his fall? Impossible. You hear the shing of metal sliding against stone. Someone has lifted your blade.
“That man was a very famous warrior,” the maiden says, from somewhere outside your vision. “The Light Archer, he was called. He freed the Crescent Islands from the headless king by one-on-one combat. He has slain countless demons and villains. He was my betrothed. But he couldn’t beat you.”
She walks past you, dragging the tip of your father’s sword over the black stone of the bridge, trailing blue sparks. She wears slim dark armor threaded with gold that she must have taken from the armory. It fits her like it was waiting for her. Like it was smithed for her ages before she was born.
“Wait,” you gasp. There is the wet, stabbing sound you know so well. The sucking pop as the blade is withdrawn. You can’t hear the knight breathing any longer.
She drags the sword back to you, and it spits sparks like a tiny, angry dragon.
She stands over you like your new God. You feel upside down again. She lifts your huge sword easily. It is becoming hers, a part of her, just as it was once a part of you. She examines the ancient blue edge in the flickering firefly light.
“How many women have you kidnapped?”
“Too many.”
“How many women have you hurt?”
“None.”
She smiles, laughs a little, and it makes her seem violently pretty.
“How many women have you handed over to violent men?”
“I couldn’t stop them. Any of them.” Beneath the visor of your helmet, you are crying again.
“You never tried.”
“I did. I tried so hard.” You are always crying. These tears, like the voice that you hate, or the armor that is your skin, are a part of your curse. “It wasn’t me.”
“Your curse?” she says.
You try to nod, but can’t. You are a ball of pain in the shape of a man.
“You are your curse.”
“I’m not. I’m more.”
“You want to be more, it’s true.” She slowly reaches down and lifts the visor of your helmet. It swings open easily for her now.
“Wait,” you say. The armor has become so heavy, you fear the bridge will collapse, taking you both with it. But what most worries you is how your face must look at this moment. Once you were handsome. Now you are an old, old man. Your hair is white and thin as light. Your bones are brittle. Your skin is gray as old paper, and half-burned and black, and all of you is as sunken as the lost continent. You are weeping blood from your one good eye. You are always weeping blood.
“I do love you,” she says. “And I don’t love you.”
“I know,” you say. There is wind on your flesh for what feels like the first time. It feels so good you want to break apart. “Take care of Comet?”
She smiles, and nods. She has always been a mixture of false and real smiles, and your curse has made it all real for you. And you are not even angry. She is right. You are to blame.
“Do you know what I love most?” she asks.
Free of the helmet, you nod. It’s hard to nod. Your body is becoming stiff. You are dying again.
“Freedom,” you say. And you know she has confused freedom with strength, and dominance with right. Just as you once did. But it’s all right. The firefly comets dance above her like an infinity of twisted halos, and she is already lifting the sword above her head, in the first step of the first form, and you wish you had more time to teach her. To show her that perfect strike.
But she will get there on her own. She will find her way. She is a better student than you ever were. It hurts a little, even now, to admit that. When you say the word “freedom,” she smiles, and thanks you for everything. The arc of the sword catches light and shines a hard elder blue in the air, and it’s not as good as yours, but it’s very, very good, and it cuts even the light, and it makes you think something mad. For a moment, you think that a brand new comet has been born. And that you are its only witness.
Copyright © 2017 Ryan Row
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Ryan Row’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Quarterly West, Shimmer, Interzone, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future Award and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He lives in Oakland, California with a beautiful and mysterious woman. You can find him online at ryanrow.com.
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COVER ART
“Land of Giants,” by Ashley Dotson
Ashley Dotson is a professional fantasy artist in the game industry who specializes in illustration and concept art. Her keen sense of atmosphere and mood lends her to aim to create a strong feeling in the viewer with everything she paints. She has an art streaming channel on Twitch where you can watch her paint live. Her artwork and a contact for work inquiries can found at www.artstation.com/artist/ashleydotson.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
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